Blog #43

Happy New Year!  It’s 2018 – wow, that’s a big number!  How did this happen?  Well, we can’t get maudlin about it.  We have to accept the new year and look forward to what lies ahead.  Like being a year older.

You know you’re an old man if your cell-phone still has the factory installed ring tone.  You know you’re an old man if you spend more time shopping for deals on pills than on cars.  You know you’re an old man if your PSA score is more important than your golf score.  You know you’re an old man if opening a grandchild’s stroller is the technological highlight of your day.  You know you’re an old man if you have read 700 books.  And you know you are a ridiculous old man if you have kept a list of all those books.  I read a lot because it fills up my head with a bunch of things I never knew before.  Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room up there.

I really do read quite a lot

And learn things more often than not

I learn, I might say,

Something new every day

To replace all the stuff I forgot.

And you know what else we have to look forward to in 2018?  More technological advances.  Thomas Friedman said that when he wrote The World Is Flat in 2004, Facebook didn’t exist, Twitter was a sound, the Cloud was in the sky and Skype was a typo.  The new world just explodes on us so fast!

Just imagine what they will come up with next!  The technology thing is a challenge, I admit.  I just spent two nights in a hotel in Los Angeles.  They really should put up a sign:  NOT RECOMMENDED FOR OLD PEOPLE.  Unlocking the door to my room was the first challenge.  There’s this little card and you don’t stick it into anything.  You just swipe it in precisely the right place at absolutely the right angle for exactly the right number of mini-seconds, and it opens.  Well, it’s supposed to.  I was about to ask the desk clerk for the right Hindu mantra to use when Carol finally showed me how to do it.  Once the door was unlocked, you had to open it.  It weighed 800 pounds.  I had to get two bell-hops and Arnold Schwarzenegger to help me push.  Who designed this place?  Mengele?  Then you have to turn on the lights.  There was no light-switch.  What happened to light switches?  Instead, there was a white, plastic plate with a picture of a light-bulb on it and if you touched it in the right place, some lights got brighter or dimmer.  All I wanted was to turn on the light, not engineer a New Year’s Eve light show in Times Square.  And, of course, the likelihood that we would figure out the television set was the same as the likelihood of Joy Behar asking Roy Moore to the prom.  And don’t even get me started about how to work the shower.

Why would you replace a thing as simple and obvious as a $2 light switch with a $90 touch-plate with arrows and pictures of light bulbs that only Elon Musk knows how to operate?  It was obvious that all these highfalutin, new-fangled gizmos cost a lot of money, because, even though the room was $350 a night, it clearly was not enough to pay for toilet paper wider than a roll of Scotch Tape.

You know, I’m not sure all this technology can improve on the old, reliable things they purport to replace – simple things like light switches, paper towels or light bulbs that actually cost less than a BMW.  Take these new Alexa things.  My wife has an Alexa.  “Alexa, add avocados to my shopping list.”  And my wife has Siri.  “Siri, where is the nearest Shake Shack?”  But neither of them can compete with the old reliable “Honey”.  “Honey, come open this jar.  Honey, can you get that bowl off the top shelf?  Honey, drive me to the bridge game; it’s raining?  Honey, can you turn up the heat?  Honey, get in the car; we’re driving 20 miles to a new restaurant to get a hamburger and fries.

That’s right, Shake Shack has come to town, and we just HAAAAD to go.  I mean, how could we allow a new restaurant to come to town and not eat there before the first ketchup spill had dried on the floor?  (And don’t tell me it’s catsup.  Ketchup is what normal people put on their fries.  Catsup is what strange people from Long Island put on their scrambled eggs.)  So we drove twenty miles and stood in a line outside in 34^o cold for 40 minutes with a bunch of college students who thought we were the cast from Cocoon III.  The atmosphere was frenetic and fun, the burger was ok, the fries were terrible and the prices were outrageous.  But it was the new thing, the place to be, the scene, the in place.  And besides, you know the old saying; nothing ventured, nothing shivering in the cold for 40 minutes just to get an average burger and cold fries.    

I like Italian food better than burgers and fries, and I especially like Sicilian food with lots of olive oil and lemon and garlic.  A Sicilian restaurant is an Italian restaurant with pictures of criminals hung in the Men’s Room.  They usually have Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in pics from The Godfather and James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.  Why do they display pictures of murderers and gangsters?  Are they proud of them?  Do you go to a Jewish deli and see pictures of Harvey Weinstein and Bernie Madoff?  Do German restaurants have pictures of Hitler?  It wouldn’t surprise me.

Hi.  Welcome back.  I hope you have all recovered from your New Year’s Eve reveling and are feeling well and eager for another year of my strange outlook on life.

We were with our two youngest grandchildren (aged 4 and 6) recently and Carol was in the back seat with them as we drove around.  They were loud and raucous, so she created a challenge.  “Let’s see if we can go for a whole minute without talking.”  I was appointed the official timer, but I knew we would never make it to the finish line, and I knew who would lose.  About 35 seconds in, Carol started talking.  You’ve heard of The Elf on the Shelf?  My wife is The Yak in the Back.  I think the 35 seconds was actually a new record for her.  In the 1850s, German physicist Rudolf Clausius proved the impossibility of Perpetual Motion.   But old Rudy never met my Whirling Dervish.

Well, this is the first blog of 2018.  I hope we will share many years together.  And thank you for all your comments.  I do appreciate them, except for the woman who sent me a 12-page letter telling me I was too wordy.  Stay well, everyone, and come back next week.

Michael                          Send comments to:  mfox1746@gmail.com